Quote - New Poser User buys Poser 8 or Pro 2010, then pays a boatload of money for content that only has RSR's. Without proper documentation in either the Software or Content explaining why some content images won't show properly in the library, this user is left up the proverbial creek without a paddle wondering why his purchases aren't working as expected.

Even seasoned Poser users can have a problem. In the original post I linked above, that made me decide to ask the question, the poster has been a Renderosity member for a decade. Poser 8 has been around for over a year and users are still finding themselves frustrated by missing thumbnails. The odds are that they wasted a lot of time trying to troubleshoot the problem before coming here to get a solution.

I wonder, in your example, if the new user would complain to DAZ tech support instead of SmithMicro since that's where they bought the content. It would be hilarious if DAZ support told the customer that the file won't open correctly in Poser 8 because SM stopped supporting the thumbnail format they developed. They could advise the customer to download the free DAZ Studio and open the files in DS to get the thumbs and--by the way--the free program will do most  of the things they wanted to do with the $250 software they just bought.

Workarounds are solutions to fix products that didn't do what customers expected. How many workarounds does anybody have for things Photoshop doesn't do well?

Unlike most software, today's Poser is not a standalone product (Poser 1 and 2 were). Poser has negligible capabilities to create new content and relies on additional products to provide more figures, clothing, and environments to create the illustrations users want. That reliance on external content, nearly all by third party vendors, makes it all the more important for Poser to maintain at least the compatibility levels it had in the past.

Why does anybody even care how much code it would take to restore RSR support? That's SM's problem. How easy it is to incorporate depends on the level of effort, whether there's a ready contract in place to handle doing new work not in the original P8 spec, and a variety of other considerations. That has no bearing on what we want to see--it only bears on the probability of it happening.

Quote - I'll observe (again) that as they removed the code implementing this, it seems highly unlikely it will be put back in.

It wasn't so much removed as not required to be added when the new library was coded from scratch. Whether that was deliberate, an oversight, a lack of awareness of the amount of content that is still available that's only RSR, or something else; who knows? Ratscloset said it was a Feature Request at SM, so there's a chance it might be brought back versus making a statement that there are no plans to include it.

You're right that RSR compatibility with P4 continued their existence long past when they should have been dropped. Since all versions of Poser, till P8, could do RSR thumbs, it was easier to only include RSRs in files to keep filesizes down. That's why we're stuck today with thousands of readily available files that don't have PNGs and won't natively show thumbnails in the latest versions of Poser.

I think Steve's referring to the additional code to incorporate the existing P7 RSR conversion routine to P8. Since you've made your own converter, how much effort do you think it would be to add it to P8?

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon